


Heart of a Dog

by Vandereer



Category: Lupin III
Genre: Almost Kiss, Introspection, Jigen Has Issues, Light Angst, M/M, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-09
Updated: 2021-02-09
Packaged: 2021-03-14 22:27:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29303460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vandereer/pseuds/Vandereer
Summary: After his near betrayal of the group, Jigen is still sorting through his feelings. About loves both past and present, and the grating feeling of not knowing where he stands.Set after Goodbye Partner.
Relationships: Jigen Daisuke & Arsène Lupin III, Jigen Daisuke/Arsène Lupin III
Comments: 3
Kudos: 37





	Heart of a Dog

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this directly after watching Goodbye Partner, and I am here to put way more thought into it than the writers probably did 
> 
> (why did Jigen show up with a different gun and screw everything up for himself in the first place this is driving me INSANE--)
> 
> Anyway, I haven't watched all of Lupin yet (working on it) but afaik this is the only time Jigen seriously goes off the rails betraying Lupin. If it's not, well, do me a solid and forget about it for now *wink* You do not see it, you are looking away.
> 
> Title is from the song Heart of a dog by The Kills. Also listen to Baby Says by the same band just because it slaps. Thank you to kiite for beta reading! mwah 
> 
> Enjoy~

It just doesn't check out; this silence - this weird pervading atmosphere of wrongness. It's been a couple of weeks now and nothing feels settled. 

And of course, Jigen knows it's his fault. 

He's where he should be, back at Lupin's side lazing on the couch with a crumpled cigarette stuck in his mouth. Lupin called them back to the USA, after a short break waiting for the heat to die down a little. 

Goemon is sat in the corner, perched like a hawk as he cleans his sword, ready for whenever he's needed again. Meanwhile Lupin is sat hunched over a desk, deep in thought planning something he no doubt won't tell Jigen and Goemon about until he decides they need to know. 

Everything is as normal as it gets. 

Occasionally Goemon will shoot Jigen a grumpy look from under his eyelashes and Lupin will side-eye him with a smirk, but that's it. 

Jigen never really fell over himself apologising for shooting Lupin in the chest, but why should he? He's a man, after all; he's never troubled himself to blather on about his feelings before, so why start now? 

He's never bothered with things like that for the same reasons he's never bothered asking Goemon for details about what exactly he's doing to his sword with that white puffball thing. He has his reasons for doing it, and Zantetsuken cuts on through guns, bank vault walls, cop cars - whatever they need it for. 

No point really, if the gears of their group are still moving as they should. 

A day or two ago, their little gang pulled off a nice quick heist that went off without a hitch. Almost aggressively efficient. 

Jigen had made a conscious effort to give it his all, to prove that he still wanted to be part of the group despite his callous words spoken over the fake time crystal in the desert. 

But only now that they were all back relaxing in the same room did Jigen notice Lupin slip a hand over his shoulder, under the leather band of his gun holster that wrapped neatly over his slim shoulders and connected to his belt. He rubs at the nasty bruise Jigen knows to be there on his breast. 

Even though Jigen’s gift of the reinforced lighter had prevented it from being fatal, Goemon had told Jigen that the gunshot had bled pretty badly and knocked him out for the few hours it took for the LAPD to collect him from the desert.

Jigen had taken every measure he could to make sure he would only knock Goemon out, not hurt him, and to get Lupin out of the way to make sure he didn’t get himself into trouble by god-forbid trying to interfere in Jigen’s business and get killed in the process. 

But still, for all intents and purposes he had pulled his old hitman act and left them to rot in the desert behind him.

Something unpleasant twists in Jigen’s stomach as Lupin rubs the soreness up and down through his crisp black shirt, like it’s distracting him too much to continue what he was doing. His brow is knotted slightly as he looks down at his work.

_I did that to him._

Jigen bites down hard on his cigarette, making a dent in the filter. The smoke isn’t as sweet as it was before somehow. He tosses it into the half-full ashtray and makes a frustrated noise as he sits up. He wants to shout all of a sudden, at both Lupin and Goemon - to ask why, _why_ they aren’t making a bigger deal of this!

Goemon barely glances up at him as he makes his sudden exit from the room.

“Say, Jigs, where are you going?” Lupin says idly, half turning around as Jigen puts his hand on the door handle. 

“Out.” Jigen says, through gritted teeth. “Buying smokes.”

_Why are you asking me?_ He wants to say, when Lupin didn’t usually bat an eye at him going somewhere. _You think I might run off again?_

Lupin looks at him with one hazel eye, shimmering gold and with a hint of green in the lamplight. Jigen gazes back from under his hat, steady and preparing a response, before Lupin smiles that damn simian smile at him. 

“I’m out of Gitanes, could you pick some up for me?”

“Sure.” Jigen growls, some of the tension leaking out of him as he slouches out. He wasn’t planning on doing anything but walking up and down the East River waterside paths until the sun went down, but maybe he would seem like less of a pathetic waste of a man if he went on a smoke run.

As he walks down the mildewy corridors of the cheapest apartment complex they could find, he wonders if Goemon and Lupin are talking about his rotten behaviour behind his back.

If he were anywhere resembling an honorable man, he would remove himself from their company completely. 

A brisk New York spring wind hits him in the face as he leaves the apartment complex, almost relieving him of his hat before he clamps a hand down on it. 

The sky is full of steadily moving clouds, the indecisive kind that don't seem to know whether they're going to rain or not. Jigen heads for the river anyway. 

He's spent the majority of the last couple of weeks sulking in a bar in the Maldives, yet his mind doesn't feel that much clearer. Not that he supposed it would; sunny beaches have never really been his style. He figured being back in his hometown might help, at least a little. 

No such luck. Not even the bustling crowds of rude New Yorkers and dodging around herds of tourists can make him stop thinking about the moment he shot his partner in the chest. He even dragged Pops into this mess! Maybe he should throw the old man an apology whenever he next shows up to clamp Lupin in irons. 

"Hey, wait up Jigen!" 

Lupin catches up to him in a light jog and meets Jigen's rumpled scowl of confusion with a curved smile. 

"You couldn't wait a half hour for your gay, Frenchy cigarettes?" Jigen grumbles, a craving sparking for one of his own. He reaches into his coat, hoping he'll start to calm down once he has a cigarette between his lips. 

Lupin is wearing the same suit he showed up in during the incident, dark blue shirt with a light pink tie and a black blazer. Normally Lupin wouldn't be caught dead in such dull colours (ones that looked like they were stolen straight out of Jigen's wardrobe).

He wonders why he’s wearing those colours; maybe he’s mourning his ex-partner's betrayal? Or maybe they were the only clothes available after Jigen put a hole in his other jacket. 

...Now is a _really_ bad time for Jigen to realise how damn good his partner looks in black. 

"Well you see," Lupin says, "I realised I could just bum one off of you, and have a nice walk at the same time." 

Jigen puffs out an ungraceful snort as his first puff of the cigarette goes down the wrong way, then tips his hat further down his face. He starts walking, the breeze cool against his burning face. "You _hate_ Pall Malls." 

Lupin smirks. "Do I?" He nods at Jigen's pack and waits for him to slip one between his lips. There's a slight shake in Jigen's hand as he lights for him. 

"Thank you Jigen, my dear!" 

Lupin smiles, but he makes a face as he takes a drag. "Lovely."

"Yeah, you look like you're _really_ enjoying it." 

Lupin turns to grin at him with his cigarette between his teeth. "Maybe Pall Malls are simply too much of a heterosexual smoke for me to handle, hm?"

Jigen huffs and looks away. 

Lupin holds his cigarette with a contemplative air as he looks around, the river on one side and looming red brick apartments on the other. "You know, it's been too long since I really slowed down to _experience_ New York. It's been so long since I walked or rode the subway!"

Jigen snorts. "What, you want to buy a hotdog? Ride the Ferris Wheel on Coney Island? Part of the reason I joined the Mafia was so I wouldn't have to ride those fuckin' trains again." 

Lupin chuckles. Jigen doesn't join him. "You don't have to keep pretending everything is okay." 

Lupin skids to a stop. "What do you mean, 'pretending'?" 

He doesn’t answer, turning away and staring off over the water.

"Jiiiiiigen?" Lupin says in a sing-song voice, trying to peek under the brim of his hat. Jigen dodges him until he gives up, then rests his elbows against the railing.

“Do you want me to leave the group?” Jigen says finally.

Lupin lets out a stream of rapid-fire chuckles, like machine gun bullet shells tinkling against the ground. “Because you ran off on us? Fujiko does that three times a _month!”_

“I’m not like that woman!” Jigen growls. “We’re not kids playing at thieving here, if you can’t trust your partners, who the hell _can_ you trust?”

Lupin nods slowly as he takes a breath. “I see.” He walks over to join Jigen, standing next to him so that their elbows are almost touching. “You crossed a line you never thought you would cross.”

“That’s right. I don’t mind if that woman throws me under the bus, hell I’ll even take it from _you_ on occasion, because I expect it of you.”

Lupin makes an offended little huff, then after a couple of seconds of consideration, nods as if to say ‘yeah, that’s fair.’

“But,” Jigen continues, shaking his head, “I betrayed my own values. I can’t forgive myself for that.”

"Jigen..." Lupin sighs. "I thought we _understood_ each other here. You did what you had to do. I trusted you, and I _still_ trust you more than anyone, ok?”

“Maybe you shouldn’t. What if I do it again? What if next time Goemon or your _Fuji-cakes_ gets hurt?”

“How about you tell me what’s going on next time?” Lupin closes an eye and jabs him lightly in the elbow. “We’ll make a plan, make it look convincing! It’s always good to have a contingency if some villain out there wants us to off each other.”

“Maybe…” Jigen mutters.

"If it's still bothering you, why didn't you _say_ something?" 

"I wanted to forget about it." Jigen admits. "But I couldn't." 

"You want to talk about it?" 

Talking about it would be like pulling teeth, but even Jigen has to admit that his unspoken words would eat at his chest otherwise. He takes a breath and leans his elbows on the cold railing, letting drops of condensation soak through his suit.

“I’ve never really spoken about it with anyone. About _her_. The woman I thought I might marry some day.”

Lupin sounds exactly like a monkey as he coos, “Ooh-ooooh! Jigen all in knots about a woman? How the tables turn! She must have been something special to get my sour little crab-apple all riled up like this!”

_“Can it!"_ Jigen growls, taking a swipe that Lupin easily ducks without taking his hands out of his pockets. “You don’t know the whole story, so don’t joke around!”

Lupin holds his hands up with a disarming smile. “Okay, okay! You can tell me Jigen, I promise I won't laugh. What was her name?"

Jigen turns towards the river and leans against the railing, staring not at the beautiful city around him but into the dirty, grimy river. 

"Riley. Her name was Riley."

"I don't know if she was anything special; not by your standards, anyway - ordinary. The beautiful kind of ordinary. She always wanted to be a concert pianist but she didn't quite make the cut. Spent her time doing Broadway, Operettas - that kind of thing. Never seemed to bother her that much - not being exceptional. If you sat her in front of a piano she was happy, and I was happy no matter what she played. 

“I couldn’t be the kind of man she needed me to be. So I left her.”

“How’d you figure that?”

“Shooting is the only thing I’ve ever been good at. I woulda had to give it up, give up _everything_ and cut all my ties with my shady past in order to settle down. I guess I got scared. Your past always catches up with you." 

“Ahhh, you’re probably right about that.” Lupin says, his line of sight drifting off. Jigen smiles at him, a fond yet rueful hitch in the corners of his mouth. He guesses Lupin is thinking about all the men, women, organizations he’s scorned over the years. Wherever Lupin goes, a trail of chaos, resentments and possibly a few illegitimate kids are left behind.

“I came back to see her twice;” Jigen continues, “once when she told me she had gotten engaged to some guy, and… again, when I got the word that she and her husband had died on the same night.”

Jigen swallows, remembering the funeral in the rain. He hadn’t been a part of Riley’s life for so long that he hadn’t been invited, resigned to watching the ceremony from the treeline like a spectre. He had felt like more of a ghost than the people being put in the ground, and he supposed he was. He had chosen this life, after all, a life of killing and safehouses and constantly moving to avoid the cops.

Jigen’s voice falls to a husky whisper, as he dredges deeper into his memories. "When I saw their kid for the first time at that funeral I thought _damn_ , I could've been her _father!_ Then I felt selfish, thinking about myself when she was standing there mourning both of her parents. 

"It felt like I was standing on the edge of another reality, watching myself and the woman I loved being lowered into the ground while our child cried. 

"It would've happened eventually. If I ever settled down, some guy I fucked over woulda come barging down the door to take everything from me.”

Lupin makes a sympathetic noise and flicks his Pall Mall into the river, with an inch of white still above the filter. Jigen would grouse at him for leaving it unfinished, but finds he doesn’t have the energy. A snake of ash falls from his own cigarette onto the sleeve of his suit, he can barely lift his arms from their slumped position on the rail to brush it away.

Lupin turns on his heel so his back is pressed against the rail, then he shoves his hands into his blazer pockets. "Is this why you have that _thing_ about women? It only takes one relationship to fall apart before a man swears off love forever." 

"Maybe. Kinda wish it would happen with you n' Fujiko, might get her off our backs for good!" 

"How cruel!" Lupin's hands flutter dramatically to his chest and he recoils as if struck. 

Romantic bastard. Whenever Jigen lost his ability to open up - to be intimate with another person and pour love all over them - a wormhole must have opened up in the universe and dumped it all into Lupin. 

Maybe it would have been a bad idea for Jigen to commit his life to a woman; he had long since realised he had a strong preference for men, so it would have ended in disaster eventually for a completely _different_ reason.

Jigen sighs, his spent cigarette dropping from loose lips to float on the scummy water. 

"I failed her. I couldn't fail her child, not after all the shit she's been through already." 

"I better be glad you're such a failure then, otherwise we might have never met!" Lupin says with a grin. 

After the frosty silence Jigen gives him in return, Lupin puts a hand over his eyes with a groan. "C'mon Jigs, don't ask me to do the whole consolation thing! You were at a crossroads, you went one way in life and she went another, that doesn't make you responsible for what happened to her." 

Jigen tips his hat down further over his face, embarrassed that he's gotten to the point where he needs reassurance like this. It sounds wrong coming out of Lupin's mouth - flippant and flaky was his usual nature. Together with Jigen's tendency to pretend he doesn't have feelings and Goemon's warrior-like stoicism, they make for a hell of a team. Maybe for their next job they should be looking to steal a therapist or two. 

"What am I to you, Lupin? Because I've given up a lot to be where I am. If this really is just a game to you, you better tell me right now.”

Jigen lowers his head again, not really sure what he's asking of Lupin. Sometimes, times like this when Lupin does something abhorrent like wear a new suit or smile at Jigen for no reason, it's hard for him to not admit that he wants to be partners with him in a very different way.

When he looks back up, Lupin is staring at him like he’s wrestling with some kind of powerful emotion. His brows are all twisted up and his jaw clenches hard before he speaks.

"You’re my _partner._ The best damn partner I’ve ever had. I can't do this without you, Jigen." 

"Yeah, you can." 

"Okay, let me rephrase that; I don't _want_ to do this without you! What did you think I was gonna say?!" 

“That you only keep me around because I’m good at what I do, and because I have more loyalty in me than common fuckin’ _sense_!”

To his surprise, Lupin grabs a fistful of his collar and yanks him so close their noses are almost touching. “Is that really what you think of me?”

Jigen shrugs. “I’m not really a man, just a tool for killing - a _gun_. I wouldn’t blame you.”

“Jesus, Jigs.” Lupin lets go of his collar, instead trailing his hand down one side of his lapels. For a brief moment - Jigen wonders if it’s just wishful thinking - but Lupin’s intense gaze moves to Jigen’s lips. His head jerks to the side, almost like he’s forcing himself to look away. “Is that really what you think of yourself? Because I’ve never believed that.”

Quicker than Jigen’s eye can follow, Lupin’s hand slips around his waist and sneaks Jigen’s Combat Magnum out of its holster.

“Hey-!” 

“Would a _gun_ risk everything to protect a little girl he’s never met, just because he loved her mother? I’ve never seen your Magnum do anything like that.”

Lupin moves the gun out of Jigen’s reach as he tries to snatch it back. "And I know a _gun_ wouldn't try to help every woman we meet even though it always ends badly for him! Because under his prickly exterior he's a big, dumb softy."

"A _softy_ who's three seconds from jamming his foot up your ass." Jigen mutters. 

Lupin grins and sneaks back into Jigen’s personal space. He flips Jigen’s coat-tail up, returning his Magnum back where it was. “A gun isn’t just a killing tool, it _protects,_ too. I’ve seen you disarm a man at fifty paces without even bruising his fingers. And I know you don’t stick around with me just because you’re _that_ desperate for money to buy Prada suits and vintage Scotch with.”

Jigen pushes Lupin in the chest (carefully, making sure not to hit his wounded side).

“According to _who ?!”_ Jigen snaps. 

Lupin smiles and shakes his head. “I think you stick around because you like having something to protect.”

Well. Shit. Lupin has got him on the hook there, one of those big cargo hooks they use down at the docks. He could never devote himself to a partner; to marriage or god _forbid_ fatherhood. 

But he could do this. He could protect Lupin.

If he went down taking a bullet so the world’s greatest thief could live on, he would consider that an honor. 

Jigen tuts and glares off at the skyscrapers crowding on the other side of the river. "How predictable do you think I am?" 

"Predictable enough! Like how I know you didn't come out here to buy cigarettes, I saw you sneak in with a whole new pack just this morning!" 

"Calm down, or I'll start calling you _Detective Zenigata_."

Lupin grins and laughs through his nose, a goofy 'nnhnnhnn!' like he always does. Jigen smiles, feeling drained but also satisfied. All he wants to do is go back to the safehouse and relax until it’s time to pull their next heist. Until he remembers the other thing that’s been bothering him. 

Jigen rubs the back of his neck. “Uh, Lupin, do you think Goemon is still-”

Lupin waves a hand. "Ah Goemon, Goemon... You know what he's like! He'll come around, he’s not as savvy to your little quirks as I am. He really thought you betrayed us for good! At least he’s learned a trick or two if anyone ever comes at us with fake chemical bullets again."

“Oh ye of little faith…” Jigen mutters. He shoves his hands in his pockets and heads back in the direction of the safehouse, walking right in front of a clump of tourists trying to take a picture of the skyline.

He notices Lupin staring at him and smiling as they walk side by side. "By the way Jigen, if you ever get crazy enough to think about settling down again, I think you'd make a great father." 

Jigen barks out a laugh as he lights a cigarette. "Shut up." 

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry about the kiss tease, my headcanon is that Jigen Absolutely does not do pda under any circumstances lmao, it would've been out of character for him to just smooch Lupin surrounded by people imho. Hope you enjoyed, keep your heads high folks <3


End file.
